ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, November 3, 1996 TAG: 9611010073
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
IT'S SAID they have changed America, and on this point there can be no dispute.
Born 35 years ago, Pampers gave women (at the time you'd have been hard pressed to find diaper-changing labeled ``men's work'') a new option when it came to their children's bottoms.
Intended for busy mothers who didn't have the time or inclination to deal with cleaning cloth diapers, Pampers came out with the first daily replacement. Today, Pampers is one in a market of five national brands and countless private labels that promise to keep babies drier and make obsolete humiliating sags in their undergarments.
"I think about my mother oftentimes," said Gena Kepley, a Roanoke mom with two children in disposable diapers, or, if you use 19-month-old Jack Kepley's term for them, "stinkies." Her own mother used cloth diapers, of course.
"I tell her, 'I cannot believe what you used to have to do,''' Kepley said. "It's like air conditioning. I can't believe anyone ever worked in an office without air conditioning."
But the world was different then.
Picture, if you will, a clothesline, with a long row of white diapers flapping in the wind.
This is the way it used to be, the way it still is at Kate Khalilian's house in South Roanoke.
"I'm probably the only woman in South Roanoke who has a clothesline, let alone who uses it," she said. "I'm a renegade, I know."
But when she quit her job - she was a bond broker in Dallas - to stay home with the kids, she wanted to keep her costs low and the environment clean. She opted for cloth diapers, though she's been known to use disposables when she's traveling or when she has a new baby sitter. (With cloth diapers, ``you have to put the pins in a certain way,'' she explained. ``Sometimes I'm a little protective.'')
The things Khalilian deals with now for 4-month-old Kian - extra loads of laundry, trips to the bathroom to soak the diapers, a clothesline of diapers being bleached by the sun - used to be a part of everyday life.
"It just became part of the routine," said Rita Bratcher, a grandmother who used cloth diapers on her children. Now, she changes diapers for the 12 infants she cares for at the Downtown Learning Center. All 12 wear disposables, she said. They're much easier, and the babies do stay drier. But before disposables, "we didn't think anything about it."
Victor Mills thought about it, though. Hard.
A researcher for Procter & Gamble in the 1950s, Mills encountered cloth diapers while baby-sitting his grandchildren on a summer trip.
Procter & Gamble officials, longtime producers of paper pulp and new owners of the Charmin Paper Co., had been encouraging the staff to come up with a new use for paper.
The result, courtesy of Mills, was Pampers.
"After traveling and changing those babies, Vic said, 'Wait, this is not a fun process,''' said Ed Rider, Procter & Gamble's corporate archivist. So when Mills, now 99, got back to work, he said, "maybe this is something we should look into."
Things known then as disposable diapers - heavy pads tucked inside of plastic pants - had been on the market in the late 1950s. But they were expensive, reserved for long trips, and certainly not for everyday use.
Procter & Gamble wanted a product that could be used daily. Mills' department designed that product.
While the first official Pampers test site was in Rochester, N.Y., the informal test site was the home of Mills' daughter, Malie Cuddy, in Roanoke.
"We had experimental toothpaste, shampoos, you name it," recalled Cuddy, who now lives in Santa Fe, N.M. "Dad tried out all kinds of experimental models."
The first Pampers test models "didn't fit really well around the legs and had a tendency to leak," she said. "They had a lot of bugs, but it was certainly nice not to travel with a pail of stinky old diapers when you were going home to grandma's house.
Gracie, her youngest child, was the first in the family to wear real Pampers when they came out in 1961, she said.
Daughter Kathy endured her grandfather's prototypes.
And son Victor Tredwell probably served as Mills' main inspiration.
"We know it as a family legend," said Tredwell, who also lives in Santa Fe. "They say he was inspired to do this by his grandson. I'm his only grandson, so it must've been me."
As a child, he said, he used to spend time at his grandparents' house in Cincinnati. "I guess I demonstrated the need for a disposable diaper," he said.
Tredwell has no children of his own, but he is active in New Mexico's Green Party, a group that hardly favors disposables.
"I tell people about it, especially the ecological folks," he said. "It is seen as ironic and funny."
But he's proud of his grandfather. "He had about 80 patents in the course of his career. Disposable diapers is just one of them."
Cuddy's daughter, Kathy, is proud of her grandad, too. But she didn't use his disposables when she had children of her own. "She's a kind of old-fashioned, ecological person," her mom said.
So is Pamela Corcoran, owner of Crystal Springs Linen Service, the only company listed in area phone books under "diapers." Corcoran is a future-minded person, too, as in: she started this business with protection of the environment and her three children in mind.
"A day that will live in infamy," she said of the advent of Pampers. "They're not disposable. Just because you take it off doesn't mean it goes away. Disposable where? Disposable to the landfill."
Corcoran has several hundred customers for her downtown Roanoke business, which picks up and delivers cloth diapers door-to-door from Lexington to Bedford to the New River Valley. Her slogan, painted on her company's delivery trucks, is "Changing the world One diaper at a time."
Time.
That's a reason many parents give for using disposable diapers - and most parents do use them. Disposables (or ``single-use diapers,'' as Corcoran calls them) account for 94 percent of all diaper changes, if you ask the folks at Procter & Gamble, 80 percent if you ask the National Association of Diaper Services.
"Time is too precious to spend it cleaning dirty diapers," said Roanoke's Judi Anderson, a mother of three. "I admire people who go through all of that, but I'm not one of them."
"To a certain extent, the environmental part bothers me," said Kepley, as her son Jack toddled back and forth across the hardwood floor. "But I had to examine the stress level and that just won out. What would save me laundry? What would save me time?"
Procter & Gamble, which, between Luvs and Pampers accounts for about half the disposable-diaper market, defends its products, arguing that the water, detergent and chlorine that go into washing and cleaning cloth diapers take their own toll on the world's resources.
"It's really a wash - no pun intended - the difference between cloth and disposables, in environmental terms," said Procter & Gamble spokesman Mark Leaf.
But cloth diapers have two lives, Corcoran, of Crystal Spring Linen Service, points out: They start out as diapers, they come back as rags. Disposables stick around, she says, as garbage.
A 1989 report, sponsored in part by the National Association of Diaper Services, lists disposable diapers as taking up 2 percent, in weight, of landfill space. "Although some may consider 2 percent small by comparison, others will be astonished," the report says. "No other single consumer product, with the exception of newspapers and beverage and food containers, contributes so much to solid waste."
Leaf agrees with the 2-percent estimate, but is quick to point out: "Newspapers take up about 5."
Still, Procter & Gamble has worked on minimizing its packaging over the past few years to cut down on waste. The company also has come out with a thinner diaper, which takes up less landfill space. The same is true with Huggies, a Kimberly-Clark Corp. product introduced in 1978 that is now the leading disposable in America with just under 40 percent of the market share.
The debate over the environmental issue is far from over, but most parents say that while they've considered cloth diapers briefly - or even tried them out - disposable diapers are what they know.
"The ease and convenience of the disposable just won out, especially with both of us working," said Pat Witten, father of 9-month-old Delaney. "Plus, you don't have to deal with those pins."
Pat Witten works the 3-to-11 shift as a restaurant manager at the Blacksburg Marriott. That means he's Delaney's primary diaper-changer during the day while his wife, Makala, is teaching at Shawsville High School.
The disposables, he said, do an amazing job.
"I'll pull a diaper off her and it seems to weigh 10 pounds," he said. But Delaney's bottom is dry.
Anderson, too, spoke of dryness.
"For a year, I had two in diapers," she added. "I should own stock in Procter & Gamble."
LENGTH: Long : 167 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. A Pampers advertisement from 1962. 2. Kian Khalilian,by CNB4 months old, keeps a close eye on his mom, Kate, as she hangs some
of the sundry cloth diapers out to dry on their back-yard
clothesline in South Roanoke. 3. A Pampers advertisement from 1972.
4. ROGER HART\Staff. Nineteen-month-old Jack Kepley plays post
office, secure in his disposable diapers. His mom, Gena, says she's
grateful for disposables with both Jack and his 6-week-old brother,
Andrew, in diapers. color.